Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Keefe can offer very few factual details about the events in the life of Jean McConville, and she is dead when the story begins. It is through the story of her abduction and murder, however, that Keefe illustrates the personal impact of the Irish Troubles on families.

Jean was Protestant but married a Catholic man named Arthur McConville. The couple started a family with 10 surviving children in Belfast before Arthur died. Jean relocated her family throughout the early years of conflict before masked intruders—who the family recognized as neighbors—came to the McConville apartment and kidnapped her. She told her oldest son to watch the other children until she got home, but the children never saw or heard from their mother again.

Rumors abound about Jean’s life in that apartment during the Troubles. She rarely left the flat and suffered from the death of her husband. The IRA picked up, questioned, and possibly beat her during one rare night out, but police returned her home. Soon thereafter, the IRA came back to collect, kill, and hide her remains. Apparently, they launched this attack because Jean was a British informant, passing intelligence via a handheld radio from within a Catholic stronghold. Her children and a later investigation into State sources deny this accusation. Keefe does not endorse either position.

Jean’s murder and disappearance sparked outrage in post-Troubles Ireland. Her plight as a widowed mother of 10 garnered sympathy. The State opened an official investigation into her disappearance and arrested a few former high-ranking Provos for questioning but convicted no one.

Jean’s body remained secretly buried until a civilian discovered her remains on a beach in the Republic in 2003. Her children easily identified her by a blue safety pin attached to her clothing. She always carried the pin to be able to quickly repair a tear in one of her many children’s clothes. 

Gerry Adams, like most other characters in the book, is neither a hero nor villain, but displays elements of both. As a very young man, he became involved in republican politics and protests. He worked his way up in the Provisional IRA in Belfast to eventually become the officer commanding of the Belfast Brigade.

He organized and ordered key events in the story, including the London car bombing and the execution of Jean McConville. Although he was known for working behind the scenes and avoiding direct confrontation, the British held Adams in internment from 1972-1977.

In prison, Adams fostered a small intellectual community and turned to politics, rather than violence, as his chief strategy to pursue a united Ireland. In 1983, he ran for political office and won as the leader of Sinn Féin. He remained president of the organization until he retired in 2017.

Adams played a key role in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which brought a delicate peace to Northern Ireland.

Though Keefe treats Adams’s involvement in the Provos as fact, and though the archival sources and oral histories confirm this history, Adams himself denies being a member of the IRA. He declined to talk to Keefe as he researched and wrote. 

Dolours was a Belfast republican who abandoned peaceful strategies in favor of violence to bring about Irish unity and expel the British. She came from a long line of militant republicans and IRA volunteers and joined the Provos in 1971. As a member of a special unit called the “Unknowns,” she carried out the notorious London bombing raid in 1973 and spent the next nine years in prison in England and Northern Ireland. The relocation was the result of a successful hunger strike Dolours undertook with her sister, Marian. They wanted to serve their sentences in their home country as political prisoners of war.

British officials released Dolours from prison and waved the rest of her sentence in 1981 because she was dying from anorexia. As she recovered, she remained politically active, canvassing for Sinn Féin. She also married actor Stephen Rea and had two sons.

Dolours later denounced Sinn Féin political strategy, vocally condemned its leader Gerry Adams, and divorced her husband. She also gave interviews for the Belfast Project. In a separate interview with project director Ed Moloney, she detailed her involvement in the disappearance of Jean McConville.

Before the state could convict her, Dolours died in 2013 from “death by misadventure,”—a toxic mixture of prescription drugs. She is buried in West Belfast.

Marian Price, Dolours’s younger sister, closely mirrored her sister in her early activism and IRA membership. Marian joined the Provos and the Unknowns, got arrested and convicted in London, went on hunger strike in British prison, and served a shortened term in Northern Ireland. The State released her from her sentence in 1980 due to mental and physical illness.

She vocalized disdain for the Good Friday Agreement and joined a new generation of IRA paramilitary strategists by the early 2000s. She spent two years in jail after she helped carry out the murder of two British soldiers in 2009.

Keefe suspects Marian of murdering Jean McConville.